FOUR

THE COLD PREDAWN air whistled past Karl’s ears and tugged at his clothes, a gale-strength blast that made it hard to breathe but still failed to blow away the rank smell of the bat-things that had him in their grip, an unsettling mixture of animal musk and decaying flesh. His shoulders ached and his eyes watered, but despite his discomfort, the wind of their passage impressed him. They were flying at an amazing speed.

To his left, across the valley, the sun had set the peaks ablaze and was crawling down the mountain slopes. As it did so, his captors flew lower and lower, until he feared he would be scraped from their grasp by the daggerlike tips of the pine trees below.

Within his chest, his heart pounded. His mistress, Ygrair, might have opened the Labyrinth, placed all the Shapers within it, and lived at its center in her own Shaped world, but she had no magical power to ensure his survival in the face of the multiple hazards every world contained. If the bat-things—vampires?—released him, he would plunge to his death in the forests below.

Still, they had held him aloft now for many minutes. Why bother if they intended to kill him? Clearly, they wanted to take him somewhere, and equally clearly, that somewhere was the castle he and Shawna had seen the moment they had entered this world. So quickly had they flown, covering the distance he and Shawna had taken a full day to walk within the space of perhaps half an hour, that already it swelled in size ahead of him, on its crag across from the cottage where the Portal had opened, and he and Shawna had spent their first night in this world.

As they swept up to the castle wall, the creatures conveying him almost bashed his skull against the battlements, so desperate did they seem to avoid the sun. Ahead loomed a tower. The sun had already lit its roof and was crawling down its stony sides. They rose a few yards. Karl saw a balcony, open French doors behind it. His captors swept up and over the railing and let go, and he dropped, hit the floor, and rolled, banging against the doorframe. Gasping, he scrambled up, went to the railing, and stared down into the castle courtyard as both winged creatures landed on its cobblestones.

The sun reached his balcony, lighting him like a spotlight. The courtyard remained in shadow, so it was hard to see clearly, but he saw well enough that the two winged creatures who had flown him to the castle suddenly became a man and a woman, both naked, the man dark-skinned, the woman light, though there had been no difference in pigmentation between them in their bat forms. Black-robed figures appeared and handed cloaks to the nude couple. They donned them unhurriedly, as if unconcerned with modesty but feeling slightly chilled, and then they and the guards disappeared from his sight as the sun continued its slow ascent and the shadows of the castle wall retreated across the flagstones below.

Karl turned from the suddenly deserted courtyard to look at the room beyond the balcony door, rubbing his sore shoulders and bruised upper arms.

The circular chamber boasted tapestried walls (the tapestries depicting hunters on horseback chasing badly rendered foxes); a four-poster bed curtained with burgundy drapes of heavy velvet; a massive wardrobe of dark wood; a fireplace in which a fire crackled cheerfully against the chill of the mountain air; two chairs arranged on either side of a round table, on which rested a covered platter; a comfortable-looking armchair by the fire, upholstered in the same deep burgundy as the bed drapes; and, next to it, a small side table holding a glass and two crystal carafes, one containing wine, the other water (or a clear liquid, at least, but it seemed unlikely to be gin or vodka). The room did not look like a prison, but when Karl crossed it to test the only door, that door was, of course, locked.

He sighed and went to the table with the covered platter. Opening it revealed bread and butter, jam and honey, a few rashers of bacon, and a wedge of hard, yellow cheese. A knife was provided, but it was far too blunt to serve as a weapon . . . not that it mattered since he still wore his own much more substantial knife at his belt. Which was curious. Why had they left him armed?

Because they don’t think I’m a threat, even with a knife, he thought, which, in its own way, was concerning. What was the traditional way of dealing with vampires? He’d read Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but a long time ago; something about garlic, crosses, a stake through the heart? But a wooden stake, not a knife.

He might be armed, yet still defenseless, if this was indeed a world Shaped to contain werewolves and vampires.

Who would Shape such a world? he wondered. And why can’t I sense him or her?

Perhaps the Shaper was dead. Robur’s fate in the previous world was proof enough if any were needed—it hadn’t been for him because he already knew it, but perhaps it was a lesson Shawna needed to learn—that a Shaped world did not necessarily protect its Shaper. He could imagine a Shaper creating a world full of monsters, spurred perhaps by a childish infatuation with tales featuring such creatures, only to fall prey to them once they became incarnate.

If that were the case, Shawna would have no one from whom to take the hokhmah of this world, and their time here was a waste that could be better spent in the next world . . .

. . . assuming he could find the Portal to it. For the moment, he could not even sense that, or, rather, the Shurak technology that provided him an awareness of such things could not. It seemed confused. Uncertain. It was still there, in his blood, in his brain; he could feel it, but it was not providing him with the information it normally did.

Which meant what?

He did not know.

He spread honey on a piece of bread and took a bite. For the moment, he was stymied, a prisoner in a strange castle that might or might not be home to the Shaper of this world. All he could do was wait for someone to come for him.

It won’t be long, he thought. The lord or lady of this castle must even now be talking to the ones who brought me. No doubt I will be summoned before long. I’m sure of it.

He sat in the comfortable chair by the fire and focused on breakfast.

---

Father Thomas and Eric led me through the gates of the walled village. The houses inside looked like mini-fortresses. Only a few were built of wood. Most were of stone or brick. All those I could see had multiple crosses of metal beaten into their walls, and every door boasted a cross that ran from top to bottom and side to side. A few window shutters had been thrown open by now, and men and women and children looked out at me suspiciously.

Father Thomas took me to a brick building not far from the gate. It contained a long table with benches on either side and a fireplace against one wall. It appeared to be a place for guards to take their coffee—or whatever they drank around here—breaks. On the mantelpiece, a tiny, intricately made clock gleamed inside a glass bell jar. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to it.

“A clock,” Father Thomas said. “It chimes to announce real dawn, and real sunset, every day as the seasons come and go.”

“Real dawn? Real sunset?”

“When the sun would appear over the horizon, or vanish behind it, if there were no mountains,” Father Thomas said impatiently. “Now, sit. Wait.” He glanced at Eric. “Guard her.”

He went out, presumably to organize the burial party he’d spoken of. I studied the boy. He studied me. He looked unhappy, still upset about shooting the werewolf. I remembered him retching on the path above me, and I couldn’t blame him for that. She had looked so human in death . . . but I hadn’t imagined the red-eyed wolf staring down at me.

“Thank you,” I ventured. “For saving my life.”

He said nothing.

“Lucky for me you were there,” I continued.

“It wasn’t luck,” he said, the first words he’d said directly to me. “We send out two-man patrols every morning just before dawn, to ensure no monsters are lurking near the village. We’d seen movement on the path, so Father Thomas decided he and I should check it out. Turns out he was right.”

“You’ve never found anything before?” I said.

Eric shook his head. “Not me, but another patrol once caught a vampire hiding out in an old farmhouse, planning to pass himself off as a human and come inside the village during the day.”

“What happened to him?” I said, then realized how stupid that must sound, considering I’d just witnessed what happened to the werewolf on the path.

“Stake,” Eric said, with admirable conciseness.

The conversation flagged at that point.

“My name’s Shawna,” I said, after a long silence. I tried a smile. “And you’re Eric.”

Nothing.

“How old are you, Eric?”

“Fifteen,” he said. “Sixteen in a month. How old are you?”

Rude, but I couldn’t help but smile. I remembered my own irritation at being asked that question when I was his age. “Twenty-seven,” I said. “Any family?”

He gave me a sullen-teenager look. He was very good at it. “Why are you asking all these questions?”

“I’m not a monster,” I said. “I’m human. And I’m grateful to be in a village full of humans. I’d like to get to know them, that’s all.” Also, I thought about adding, but didn’t, have you had any hints one of them might be the person who Shaped this horror-movie world?

“Father Thomas is my only family,” Eric said. “I’m an orphan. Left on the church steps as a baby.”

“So you live with Father Thomas?”

“No, I live in the orphanage.” There was more than a hint of how-stupid-can-you-be in that reply: teenagers, apparently, were the same yesterday, today, and forever, in whatever world you visited.

“But he’s raised you?”

“Father Thomas is training me to be a priest. Like him.”

Training which apparently included, in this world, how to shoot werewolves with a crossbow.

I would have asked more questions, but Father Thomas chose that moment to return. “Let’s go,” was all he said from the open doorway. Eric, between me and the door, stepped to one side, but kept his crossbow leveled. I got up from the bench and followed Father Thomas out into the street.

He escorted me down it toward a square fronted by shops and the church. Villagers stepped aside and regarded me with suspicion, muttering to each other, as I passed. They looked like they belonged in the opening number of Beauty and the Beast. I half-expected someone to yell, “Marie! The baguettes! Hurry up!”

With Eric following us, Father Thomas led me to the church, but not up the steps to the big front doors. Instead, he took me down one side. I saw gravestones ahead, through a roofed gateway in a wall extending out from the church wall. The lych-gate, some part of my mind supplied.

We turned right and went through a small back door in the church into a narrow, stone-walled and flagstone-floored hallway. “Take her into the south side-chapel,” Father Thomas told Eric. “I will join you momentarily.”

The priest turned left through a side door, closing it behind him. “Keep going,” Eric said, and I continued through the door at the end of the hall, emerging into the main part of the church. I glanced back at Eric. “Side-chapel,” he said, jerking his crossbow to the right. I followed orders, and a moment later stood before a very plain marble baptismal font, beneath a rather spectacular stained-glass window showing the crucified Christ, in the aisle between four rows of wooden pews, the nave behind me.

Father Thomas joined us a few minutes later. He now wore a white cassock and a golden stole trimmed in red.

“We haven’t been properly introduced,” I said to him. “My name is Shawna Keys.”

He frowned at that. “An odd name.”

“And you are . . . ?” I prompted.

His eyes narrowed. “Thomas Hauptman, priest of the village and parish of Zarozje.” (I found out how to spell it later—to me it sounded like Za-rose-yeh.) “You are remarkably calm, Shawna Keys, for one whose life hangs in the balance.”

“Guess you could say I’m trying to put my finger on that balance,” I said. “I’m not a threat, Father Thomas.”

“Simply saying you are not a threat is not proof you are not. A monster would say the same.”

“A moment ago, we were in the sun,” I pointed out. “I didn’t burst into flames or crumble into dust.”

Father Thomas frowned. “Why would you?”

Oops. “Isn’t that what vampires do when the sun touches them?”

His frown deepened. “Of course not. They simply turn into ordinary human beings, like you, until the sun sets again.”

Who Shaped this? I thought indignantly. That’s all wrong! “Okay, but I was already an ordinary human being. Even before the sun touched me.”

“And as I already pointed out, merely making that claim proves nothing.”

“At least you know I’m not a werewolf,” I pressed on. “I was human even before the sun came up, while the werewolf you shot was still a wolf.”

“Again, your defense is meaningless,” Father Thomas said. “Werewolves can control if or when they change during the moonlit night. You could have chosen to remain unchanged last night, or you could have changed back to human and dressed yourself well before dawn, in order to deceive us this morning. You may have had a plan to appear to be threatened by the monster Eric shot, to make us trust you, a plan thwarted only by Eric’s good aim. Perhaps she was supposed to run off, we were to rescue you and bring you inside the walls, and tonight you would have opened the gates and with her ravaged the village.”

I grimaced, while a part of me puffed up in outrage. Werewolves here could control their change, even beneath a full moon? Vampires merely became ordinary humans in the light of the sun? How dare a Shaper play with established folklore like this? How was I supposed to navigate their world if I couldn’t count on what I thought I knew?

Just like the Jules Verne-inspired world, filled with things Verne never wrote about, I reminded myself. I was beginning to sense a trend.

“And so,” Father Thomas said, “I must test you. Which is why we are here, in this holy place.”

I sighed. “Fine. Bring it,” I said, then belatedly thought, Wait. Is “test” a euphemism for “torture?” Is there a kind of Spanish Inquisition in effect around here after all? I wasn’t expecting it, but then, I wouldn’t, would I?

Father Thomas continued to frown. “Your way of speech is as odd as your name.”

“I’m not from around here,” I understated.

“There is nowhere but here to be from. If you are human, your lies do you no credit. If you are not human, they will do you no good. Silver and holy water will settle the issue.”

“I love silver, and I can take a bath in holy water if you want. I’m human.”

His frown deepened to a scowl. “Bathing in holy water would be sacrilegious.”

Crap again. “Sorry. I’m not Catholic.”

“You’re not what?” He shook his head. “Never mind. Eric, hold her.”

Eric lowered his crossbow for pretty much the first time since he’d seen me, set it on one of the pews, and gripped my arm tightly. “Ow,” I said, giving him a dirty look. He met my gaze and squeezed even harder.

Scowling, I faced Father Thomas.

“You remember your lessons in this matter,” the priest said over my shoulder to Eric.

“Yes, Father.”

“And the tests are?” Father Thomas asked. Apparently, I was part of the priestly equivalent of a teaching hospital’s bedside visit by a physician.

“First, holy water,” Eric said. “The priest must draw a cross upon the forehead with a forefinger wetted with holy water, while praying the Prayer of Discernment.”

Thomas removed the bronze lid from the font and crossed himself. Then he dipped his hand in the water, turned, and while loudly reciting something in Latin—They have Latin here? ran through my mind—drew a damp cross on my forehead, finishing with “Amen.”

I resisted the suicidal impulse to scream and thrash, and instead merely smiled at him. “Cold,” I said. “But refreshing.”

He frowned, but addressed Eric, not me. “What does this indicate?”

“That is the definitive test for a vampire,” he said behind me. “She is not one.”

“Could I even stand before a stained-glass window depicting Christ on the cross,” I emphasized the word, “if I were a vampire?”

Father Thomas looked at me again, as though, whether or not I was evil, I was definitely dim. “During the day? Of course you could.”

“But not at night.”

“No.”

“Yet, even during the day, I could not stand the touch of holy water.”

“Of course not.”

“How about garlic?”

“Opinions differ. It may depend upon how it is used.”

“Do vampires cast reflections?”

“During the day, yes. At night, no.” He shook his head irritably. “Enough of this. Be quiet and stand still.”

Another world where I can’t trust anything I think I know, I thought. Great. “Why?” I said out loud. “I just passed your test.”

“For being a vampire, yes,” he said. “But not for being a werewolf.”

He turned away and took something from the chapel’s altar. When he turned back, he was holding what looked like a sewing needle. He grabbed my arm, and without a word of warning, scratched my wrist with the needle’s point.

I flinched. “Hey!” I looked down in outrage at the little spots of blood forming along the scratch. “What was that for? And was that pin sterile?”

“I do not know what that means,” he said, “except in the sense of infertility, and that would not seem to be applicable to an inanimate object.”

“Great,” I muttered.

“It was silver,” he went on. “Were you a werewolf, you would be howling in agony right now.” He nodded to Eric. “Release her,” he said, and just like that, I was free.

Eric drew a deep breath, and I glanced at him in surprise. He seemed almost as relieved as I was. He was afraid he’d have to shoot me, too. I was glad that at least he hadn’t been looking forward to it.

I turned from him to Father Thomas and gave him my best glare. “If I get blood poisoning . . .”

Father Thomas considered me a moment longer, then told Eric, “You may go, son.”

“Are you sure, Father?” Eric said.

“She is human, not demon,” Thomas said. “Neither vampire nor werewolf, as I have just proved. Whatever her purpose here, I do not think she will somehow overpower me.”

I would have felt hurt if not for the fact he stood at least six-foot-two and his broad shoulders strained the corners of his cassock. I figured he could pick me up like a rag doll if he wanted to.

Might be fun, my libido, which had been sadly underused these past few weeks, commented. I told it to shut up.

Father Thomas stepped past me and put his hands on Eric’s shoulders. “I know how difficult this morning has been for you,” he said softly. “You did what had to be done. Cling to that thought. Do not dwell on the girl on the path. Remember instead the monster she was when you shot her. Remember this one,” he nodded toward me, “who now lives because of your quick action.”

“Yes, Father,” the boy murmured.

Father Thomas squeezed his shoulders. “We will talk later.” He released Eric, who gave me a final inscrutable look, and then picked up his crossbow and walked away, toward the main doors of the church. Rather than go through them, though, he disappeared through a side door, leaving me alone with Father Thomas.

The priest led me from the side-chapel into the dim, incense-scented nave, motioned me to sit on the front pew, and then sat beside me.

I looked around at the Gothic interior. “Nice church,” I said. “Is it old?”

“Several centuries,” he said. “It was built two hundred years before the Great Cataclysm.”

That gave me two things to think about. First, it wasn’t nearly that old, really, of course. No Shaped world could be older than Ygrair’s academy for Shapers, and it had only been around a century and a bit. Karl, from what he said, was somewhat older than that, and Ygrair, being an alien and all, was presumably considerably older.

But that conversation I’d had with Karl about God and time came to mind. If a world were Shaped with the appearance of age, how was that different from it actually being that age? Time, once it has passed, is not something you can travel back into, Doctor Who, H. G. Wells, and various episodes of Star Trek notwithstanding. We live in the moment, as actors like to say, one eternal present moment, the past existing only as our memories of it. A church Shaped to be “several centuries” old would be absolutely identical to one that, in the First World, had actually passed through those several centuries.

For all I knew, I had just been created, and everything I thought I had experienced up to this moment . . . or this moment . . . or this moment . . . were memories just now inserted in my mind by some über-Shaper.

My brain hurt again.

Second, and of more immediate interest: what on Earth, or whatever this world was called, was the Great Cataclysm?

“What on Earth was the Great Cataclysm?” I repeated out loud, since I seemed more likely to get an answer that way.

Father Thomas looked at me, again, as though I were either crazy or irredeemably dim. I didn’t take it personally. I’d gotten that look a lot in recent weeks, starting with the moment Karl Yatsar discovered I had no memory of being at Ygrair’s school and didn’t even know I had Shaped the world I thought I’d grown up in, and continuing through several encounters in the aforementioned Jules Verne-inspired world. For example, Athelia, who had replaced Robur (the Shaper) as ruler of the Republic of Weldon after his death, had given me exactly that look when I’d tried to explain the musical Cats to her.

“How could you not know of the Great Cataclysm?” Thomas said.

“I’m not from around here,” I said, again. Some people need reminding. “I’m from . . . outside this valley.”

His expression went from confusion to flat-out rejection. “I have already told you; your lies are useless. No one lives outside the Valley. Not anymore.”

“What?” That startled me. “In the whole world?”

“That is what the Great Cataclysm was,” he said. “The cleansing of the world by God, the wiping away of sinful humanity everywhere but in this valley, this new ark for a new generation of the righteous.”

“That’s just what you think,” I said, still trying to salvage my story. “Not everyone was wiped away. My people survived. Our land has grown and prospered, and now we are exploring the world. We came into this valley . . .”

“Stop!” Father Thomas cried. “Have you no shame? Would you blaspheme in the very house of the Lord?”

Blaspheme? Claiming God didn’t kill everyone outside this valley a few hundred years ago was blasphemy?

No one actually died, I reminded myself. It’s all just fictional backstory. And God had nothing to do with it. This is all the work of the Shaper.

But why?

It was, after all, a rather disturbing thing to build into the fabric of the world. The story of Noah’s Ark had always terrified me in Sunday School. Sure, God promised he would never again destroy the entire world with a flood—“Never again will all life be destroyed by the waters of a flood; never again will there be a flood to destroy the earth,” the Bible said, a sentiment so nice, God said it twice—but eight-year-old me couldn’t help but notice that there was nothing in that promise about never again destroying all life using some other method: “the fire next time,” as the saying went.

“Did God kill the animals, too?” I said.

Thomas looked like I was giving him either whiplash or, possibly, a stroke. “What?”

“In the flood, God killed humans and animals, but had Noah save a pair of every animal in order to repopulate the Earth. Did God fill the valley with animals?”

“No,” Thomas said impatiently. “The animals were unaffected by the Great Cataclysm. They have the run of the Earth outside this valley, untroubled by humanity.”

Good for them. “I don’t know what to tell you, Father,” I said, trying for humility. (A stretch, I know.) “I entered this valley only two nights ago.” I stuck to first-person singular: I figured I’d work my way around to mentioning the missing Karl later. “Before that, I was in a very different place. Clearly, not the world outside this valley, but . . . somewhere else.” Okay, I thought. Let’s see him interpret that. Is there room for another heaven and earth in his Shaper-dreamt philosophy?

To my surprise (and relief, since I still didn’t know where the Church in this Shaped valley stood on the whole burn-the-heretic thing), it appeared there was. The doubt and suspicion that had been his primary responses to me thus far suddenly gave way to a wide-eyed look of wonder. “’S’truth?” he said, a marvelously medieval turn of phrase I’d never before heard someone use in actual conversation.

“You’ve . . . heard of other worlds?” I said cautiously.

“Of course,” he said. “Did not Jesus say, ‘And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd.’?”

“That’s in your version of the Bible?” In my world . . . or at least in my Sunday School . . . that was usually taken to be a reference to Gentiles since Jesus had said it to Jews. But in this Shaped world, that apparently wasn’t the standard interpretation.

Oh, there was that “are-you-crazy-or-just-dim?” look again.

“Version of the Bible? There are no ‘versions’ of the Bible. There is only the Bible.”

I thought about asking if it was the King James Version, but I suspected the question would make no sense, so for once I shut up. Anyway, the scripture he’d quoted had definitely been the King James Version, so maybe he’d already answered it.

“No,” Thomas continued. “The many-worlds hypothesis is a matter of metaphysical speculation.”

Many-worlds hypothesis? The phrase was so incongruously modern I almost laughed out loud. “Metaphysical speculation?” I said, instead.

He nodded seriously. “The Mother Church’s seminary—where I and all priests of the Valley once studied and took our vows—has long maintained an intellectual order devoted to research and thought on the subject of the nature of the universe. There has been a long-standing debate between the ‘one-world’ and ‘many-worlds’ factions. The former believe that God only created one world, and we who dwell in the Valley, having escaped the Great Cataclysm, are therefore the only humans who still exist.

“However, there are many equally devout and devoted scholars who maintain that the creation of worlds is a defining part of God’s nature, and thus to claim that He only ever created one is hubristic, a narrow, limiting conception of God—in support of which, they quote John 10:16, as I have just done. They believe that, if God created one world with humans upon it, He may well have created many more. There may be worlds, they suggest, where humanity did not fall, where Eve did not eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and give it to Adam, who ate it in turn; where humanity still lives in innocence and ease within the Garden.”

Innocence and ease and perpetual nudity, I thought. “Not . . . the kind of world I came from,” I said, understating things again by a considerable amount. C. S. Lewis had played with that idea, though. I wondered if I’d find myself in a version of Perelandra at some point, if—admittedly a big “if”—I survived my quest long enough to visit a sizable number of Shaped worlds.

Or maybe Narnia. Talking animals would make a nice change, provided someone had already dealt with the White Witch.

“Of course not,” Thomas said. “Those who dwell in such a world would never leave it. But that does not preclude the possibility of many other worlds, an infinitude of worlds, perhaps, where history has taken a different path than in our own—since in each, humanity would have free will to follow or fall away from the will of God, and every time a man or woman made one choice, another world would be born where he or she made the other choice. And if there are an infinitude of worlds, then it stands to reason that, however rare may be the occurrence, those who dwell in one may sometimes find a way to journey to another.”

I personally wasn’t sure reason had anything to do with such a belief. But it offered me a way to account for my arrival here, so . . . “That does seem to explain why I find myself in a world I know nothing about,” I said cautiously.

“But this is marvelous!” Thomas exclaimed, beaming. “Your presence . . . this will settle a metaphysical argument that has raged for centuries. Once Mother Church knows . . .” But then his face fell. “If she still stands.”

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“Nothing has been heard from her for almost ten years,” Thomas said. “Since the breaking of the Pact. Riders once came regularly to every church in the valley, once a month, bearing words of encouragement, news, instruction. Neither I nor any of the remaining priests I have managed to exchange messages with has seen a rider from Mother Church since the Pact collapsed.”

The Pact? I didn’t have a clue what that was, but I set that question aside for later. “Hasn’t anyone tried to reach it . . . um, her?” I said.

“Of course,” Father Thomas said. “Armed expeditions have been sent. None have returned.”

“That doesn’t sound good.” And it didn’t, not only because of what it implied about the state of this world, but because it could very well be that the Shaper had been part of—maybe even the head of—Mother Church and something, potentially something fatal, had happened to him or her.

What I needed to find out first, though, was what had happened/was likely to happen to Karl. After that, I could worry about finding the Shaper. To achieve either goal, I needed more information. “So, if you believe me now, will you tell me more about your world? As if I’ve never been here before? Because I haven’t.”

“Of course,” Thomas said. “If you will also tell me of yours.”

“Of course,” I said, though I wondered what he would make of it. “But first, I must tell you . . . I did not enter this world alone.”

He frowned. “You had companions? What happened to them?”

“Just one companion, a man named Karl Yatsar. And what happened to him, happened last night. Before the werewolf—and you—showed up.” I told him how we had been pursued by vampires from the castle, and how, just as it began to get light, Karl had been seized and borne away. “Can you tell me what his fate is likely to be?”

“Nothing good,” Father Thomas said heavily. “I am very sorry, but if he has been taken by the vampires there are only two possible outcomes. Either they will feed on him and discard his blood-drained body, or, worse . . .”

“There’s a worse?” I said, horrified.

“They will turn him into one of themselves.” He shook his head. “I grieve to tell you this, Shawna Keys, but if you see your friend again, he will no longer be your friend. He will be a soulless demon. He is either dead or undead . . . and yes, the latter is much, much worse.”